Storer College

History

Storer College originated in a $10,000 conditional gift from John Storer of Sanford, Maine, who in 1865 approached the president of Bates College with the proposal to fund a school in a southern state that would educate students “regardless of color or race” and would eventually be elevated to college standing. The Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society accepted the conditions and selected Harpers Ferry as the site — the symbolic geography of John Brown's 1859 raid, the chosen ground in the public imagination on which (in Frederick Douglass's phrase) “the end of American slavery began.” The college opened in October 1867 with nineteen students in a former federal armory paymaster's quarters.

For the next nine decades Storer operated as one of the few legally integrated institutions of higher education anywhere in the American South. Its student body was predominantly Black throughout, but a continuous minority of white students attended, in defiance of West Virginia constitutional provisions that prohibited racially mixed schooling. The institution graduated J. R. Clifford in 1875 — the state's first Black attorney and the founding editor of The Pioneer Press, the first Black newspaper in West Virginia.

From August 15 to 19, 1906, Storer hosted the first American meeting of the Niagara Movement, the militant Black political-action body organized in 1905 by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter as a direct alternative to the Tuskegee accommodationist program of Booker T. Washington. The founding meeting of the Niagara Movement had taken place the prior summer on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls because no American hotel would house an integrated meeting; the 1906 Harpers Ferry session at Storer was therefore the first such gathering on U.S. soil. The Niagara Movement was the organizational and ideological precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909. The Storer site is thus, in the institutional genealogy of American civil rights, the place where the modern NAACP tradition first met in the United States.

Through the first half of the twentieth century Storer functioned as a regional college serving the Black populations of West Virginia, western Maryland, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and the southern reaches of Pennsylvania. It awarded degrees in liberal arts, education, and the sciences, and produced generations of Black teachers, ministers, and professionals for the upper South.

Notable Alumni and Associated Figures

• J. R. Clifford (Class of 1875) — West Virginia's first Black attorney; founding editor of The Pioneer Press; one of the original delegates to the 1906 Niagara Movement meeting on the Storer campus.
• W. E. B. Du Bois — presided over the 1906 Niagara Movement meeting at Storer; not an alumnus but the figure whose use of the Storer site as the convocation ground for the early NAACP tradition fixed the college in twentieth-century civil rights memory.
• Don Redman — the jazz arranger and bandleader who anchored Fletcher Henderson's orchestra and later led his own ensembles, attended Storer in the 1910s before his music studies elsewhere.
• Generations of Upper South Black teachers — Storer was the principal post-secondary teacher-training pipeline for the Black public-school systems of West Virginia and the surrounding states from the 1870s through the 1950s.

Significance

Storer is one of the most historically consequential closed HBCUs in the United States, occupying a unique intersection of three distinct historical narratives: the John Brown abolitionist tradition (through its Harpers Ferry geography), the Reconstruction-era Northern philanthropic mission to the freedpeople (through John Storer and the Freewill Baptists), and the early-twentieth-century militant civil rights tradition (through the 1906 Niagara Movement meeting). No other closed HBCU sits at the convergence of those three lineages.

The closure of Storer in 1955 is the cleanest documented case in the HBCU canon of an institution destroyed by the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education. The withdrawal of West Virginia state support occurred not despite integration but because of it: the legal logic that had quietly underwritten state subvention of a private integrated HBCU evaporated overnight when the constitutional basis for separate Black higher education was struck down. Storer is thus a primary historical example of the perverse second-order effects of formal integration on the institutional infrastructure of Black higher education — a pattern that would recur on a much larger scale at the public junior-college level in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere over the next decade.

The preservation of the Storer campus within Harpers Ferry National Historical Park has made it — uniquely among closed HBCUs — a federally administered site of public memory. The Niagara Movement's 1906 gathering is now interpreted by the National Park Service as one of the principal civil rights commemorations on the Harpers Ferry grounds, alongside the John Brown narrative. That stewardship remains active: in 2026 the Park Service issued a Request for Expression of Interest inviting proposals for the adaptive reuse of the former Storer dormitory Cook Hall (built 1940), and the park scheduled a series of commemorations tied to the nation's 250th anniversary, including a Veterans Day wreath-laying at the Storer College Veterans' Monument honoring students who served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I.